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History of Linux Table of Contents
a. In The Beginning b. New Baby in the horizon c. Confrontation and
development d. Some Linux Cookies e. Ackknowledgments
a. In The Beginning
It was 1991, and the ruthless agonies of the cold war was gradually coming
to an end. There was an air of peace and tranquility that prevailed in the
horizon. In the field of computing, a great future seemed to be in the
offing, as powerful hardware pushed the limits of the computers beyond what
anyone expected.
But still, something was missing.
And it was the none other than the Operating Systems, where a great void
seemed to have appeared.
For one thing, DOS was still reigning supreme in its vast empire of personal
computers. Bought by Bill Gates from a Seattle hacker for $50,000, the bare
bones operating system had sneaked into every corner of the world by virtue
of a clever marketing strategy. PC users had no other choice. Apple Macs
were better, but with astronomical prices that nobody could afford, they
remained a horizon away from the eager millions.
The other dedicated camp of computing was the Unix world. But Unix itself
was far more expensive. In quest of big money, the Unix vendors priced it
high enough to ensure small pc users stayed away from it. The source code of
Unix, once taught in 1universities courtesy of Bell Labs, was now cautiously
and not published publicly. To add to the frustration of PC users worldwide,
the big players in the software market failed to provide an efficient
solution to this problem.
A solution seemed to appear in form of MINIX. It was written from scratch by
Andrew S. Tanenbaum, a dutch professor who wanted to teach his students the
inner workings of a real operating system. It was designed to run on the
Intel 8086 microprocessors that had flooded the world market.
As an operating system, MINIX was not a superb one. But it had the advantage
that the source code was available. Anyone who happened to get the book
'Operating System' by Tanenbaum could get hold of the 12,000 lines of code,
written in C and assembly language. For the first time, an aspiring
programmer or hacker could read the source codes of the operating system,
which to that time the software vendors had guarded vigorously. Students of
Computer Science all over the world poured over the book, reading through
the codes to understand the very system that runs their computer.
And one of them was Linus Torvalds.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
b. New Baby in the Horizon
In 1991, Linus Benedict Torvalds was a second year student of Computer
Science at the University of Helsinki and a self-taught hacker. The 21 year
old sandy haired soft-spoken Finn loved to tinker with the power of the
computers and the limits to which the system can be pushed. But all that was
lacking was an operating system that could meet the demands of the
professionals. MINIX was good, but still it was simply an operating system
for the students, designed as a teaching tool rather than an industry
strength one.
At that time, programmers worldwide were greatly inspired by the GNU project
by Richard Stallman, a software movement to provide free and quality
software. The much awaited Gnu C compiler was available by then, but there
was still no operating system. Even MINIX had to be licensed. Work was going
the GNU kernel HURD, but that was not supposed to come out within a few
years.
That was too much of a delay for Linus.
In August 25, 1991 the historic post was sent to the MINIX news group by
Linus .....
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups:
comp.os.minix Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? Summary:
small poll for my new operating system Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT Organization: University of Helsinki
Hello everybody out there using minix - I'm doing a (free) operating system
(just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT
clones. This has been brewing ; since april, and is starting to get ready.
I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS
resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to
practical reasons) among other things). I've currently ported bash(1.08) and
gcc(1.40),and things seem to work.This implies that I'll get something
practical within a few months, andI'd like to know what features most people
would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement
them :-) Linus (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi) PS. Yes - it's free of any
minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386
task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than
AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(.
As it is apparent from the posting, Linus himself didn't believe that his
creation was going to be big enough to change computing forever. Linux
version 0.01 was released by mid september 1991, and was put on the net.
Enthusiasm gathered around this new kid on the block, and codes were
downloaded, tested, tweaked, and returned to Linus. 0.02 came on October
5th, along with this famous declaration from Linus:
From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Newsgroups:
comp.os.minix Subject: Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT Message-ID:
<1991Oct5.054106.4647@klaava.Helsinki.FI> Date: 5 Oct 91 05:41:06 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki Do you pine for the nice days of
minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? Are you
without a nice project and just dying to cut your teeth on a OS you can try
to modify for your ; needs? Are you finding it frustrating when everything
works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a nifty program working? Then
this post might be just for you :-) As I mentioned a month(?) ago, I'm
working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers. It has
finally reached the stage where it's even usable (though may not be
depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for
wider distribution. It is just version 0.02 (+1 (very small) patch already),
but I've successfully run bash/gcc/gnu-make/gnu-sed/compress etc under it.
Sources for this pet project of mine can be found at nic.funet.fi
(128.214.6.100) in the directory /pub/OS/Linux. The directory also contains
some README-file and a couple of binaries to work under linux (bash, update
and gcc, what more can you ask for :-). Full kernel source is provided, as
no minix code has been used. Library sources are only partially free, so
that cannot be distributed currently. The system is able to compile "as-is"
and has been known to work. Heh. Sources to the binaries (bash and gcc) can
be found at the same place in /pub/gnu. Linux version 0.03 came in a few
weeks. By December came version 0.10. Still Linux was little more than in
skeletal form. It had only support for AT hard disks, had no login ( booted
directly to bash). version 0.11 was much better with support for
multilingual keyboards, floppy disk drivers, support for VGA,EGA, Hercules
etc. The version numbers went directly from 0.12 to 0.95 and 0.96 and so on.
Soon the code went worldwide via ftp sites at Finland and elsewhere.
back
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c. Confrontation & Development
Soon Linus faced some confrontation from none other than Andrew Tanenbaum,
the great teacher who wrote MINIX. In a post to Linus, Tanenbaum commented:
" I still maintain the point that designing a monolithic kernel in 1991 is a
fundamental error. Be thankful you are not my student. You would not get a
high grade for such a design :-)" (Andrew Tanenbaum to Linus Torvalds)
Linus later admitted that it was the worst point of his development of
Linux. Tanenbaum was certainly the famous professor, and anything he said
certainly mattered. But he was wrong with Linux, for Linus was one stubborn
guy who won't admit defeat. Tanenbaum also remarked that : "Linux is
obsolete".
Now was the turn for the new Linux generation. Backed by the strong Linux
community, Linus gave a reply to Tanenbaum which seems to be most fitting:
Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good
excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix. (Linus Torvalds to Andrew
Tanenbaum)
And work went on. Soon more than a hundred people joined the Linux camp.
Then thousands. Then hundreds of thousands. This was no longer a hackers
toy. Powered by a plethora of programs from the GNU project, Linux was ready
for the actual showdown. It was licensed under GNU General Public License,
thus ensuring that the source codes will be free for all to copy, study and
to change. Students and computer programmers grabbed it.
Soon, commercial vendors moved in. Linux itself was, and is free. What the
vendors did was to compile up various software and gather them in a
distributable format, more like the other operating systems with which
people were more familiar. Red Hat , Caldera, Debian, and some other
companies gained substantial amount of response from the users worldwide.
With the new Graphical User Interfaces (like X-windows, KDE) the Linux
distributions became very popular.
Meanwhile, there were amazing things happening with Linux. Engineers have
tweaked Linux to run 3Com's handheld PalmPilot computer. Red Hat Software's
version of Linux won the 1996 award for bestdesktop computer operating
system from trade magazine InfoWorld. In April that year researchers at Los
Alamos National Laboratory used Linux to run 68 PCs as a single parallel
processing machine to simulate atomic shock waves.The do-it-yourself
supercomputer cost only $152,000, including labor (connecting the 68 PCs
with cables)-about one tenth the price of a comparable commercial machine.
It reached a peak speed of 19 billion calculations per second, making it the
315th most powerful supercomputer in the world. Three months later it still
didn't have to be rebooted.
The best thing about Linux today is the fanatic following it commands.
Whenever a new piece of hardware is out, Linux kernel is tweaked to take
advantage of it. For example, within weeks after the introduction of Intel
Xeon® Microprocessor, Linux kernel was tweaked and was ready for it. It has
also been adapted for use in Alpha, Mac, PowerPC, and even for palmtops, a
feat which is hardly matched by any other operating system. And it continues
its journey into the new millenium, with the same enthusiasm that started
one fine day back in 1991. As for Linus, he remains a simple man. Unlike
Bill Gates, he is not a billionaire. Having completed studies, he moved to
USA and landed a job at Transmeta Corporation. Recently married, he is the
proud father of a girl, Patricia Miranda Torvalds. But he remains as the
world's most favorite and most famous programmer to this date. Revered by
Computer communities worldwide, Linus is by far the most popular programmer
on this planet. He deserves it.
<hr> Epilogue 2000 The year 2000 started as the beginning of a new century,
and of course, a brand new millenium. With the ever increasing popularity of
Linux sky-rocketing to new heights, it was clear that Linux was to stay as
an inevitable part of computing in the 3rd Millenium. And the father of
Linux, Linus Torvalds also created headlines when his company Transmeta
Corporation delivered the ultimate result of their secret product, the
amazing Crusoe(TM) processor. Linus worked from the beginning as a project
member, and the resultant Crusoe processor is another testimony to his
remarkable abilities as a dreamer. One thing is clear, The Future Belongs To
Linux!
Acknowledgements <hr>
History is always boring, but history of Computing and that of Linux are
very interesting. Much of the source of this article has been taken from the
Internet. It was inspired by the questions asked by many would be Linux
users at meetings and postings of Bangladesh Linux Users Group.Thanks to
all. All materials taken from various sources belong to their respective
authors. All trademarks belong to the respective corporations and companies.
Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft corp.
The author fully reserve the right to the portions of this article written
solely by himself, under Gnu GPL. However all are requested to distribute
this article freely and vigorosly provided my name and email address is
given clearly with this article. ( If this legal things bore you, don't
blame me. Who knows, Microsoft lawyers might find a way to sue for their
Logo or name... :) ).
For all mistakes and suggestions Contact me: Ragib Hasan, Department of
Computer Science & Engineering, Bangladesh University of Engineering &
Technology, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
mail me at ragibhasan@yahoo.com
About the AuthorRagib Hasan is a senior year Student of Computer
Science and Engineering at Bangladesh University of Engineering and
Technology. He is an ardent follower of the Linux movement for free and open
operating system and the GNU free software project. His other interests
include Computer Programming (He is an award winning programmer), writing
and Science fiction. A member of IEEE and BDLUG, he hopes for a better
tomorrow. He can be reached at ragibhasan@yahoo.com
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